A new study led by Johns Hopkins researchers found that measures of connectivity within specific cerebral networks were strongly linked to long-term functional outcomes in patients who had suffered severe brain injury following a cardiac arrest.

A description of the findingssuggests that mapping and measuring such connectivity may result in highly accurate and reliable markers of long-term recovery trajectories in people with neurological damage caused by heart attacks, strokes, brain hemorrhage or trauma.

“By analyzing functional MRI data we are able to see where brain network disruption is occurring, and determine how these changes relate to the likelihood of recovery from brain damage,” says Robert Stevens, M.D., associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the paper’s senior author.